Which is exactly what drew me to him. I’m not a genius or a savant, either, and while I hope to improve with years of experience, as Manuel did, it’s entirely reasonable to suppose that my work will be forgotten shortly after my death save by the occasional fan of old, weird things. There’s a certain delight in discovering the works of a long-forgotten artist, almost as if you are being initiated into a cabal, and when I stumbled over Manuel’s Death and the Maiden, the piece that at last found its way onto the cover of the finished novel, I had that heady rush of excitement at finding someone fresh at the bottom of a five hundred year old grave. Metaphorically speaking.

That image perfectly captured the ambiance of the project I had planned, and when I saw that the title of the piece was attributed, possibly incorrectly, as Enterprising Death, I quickly realized I had a name for my next novel. Fine and good, especially since finding a good title can be so elusive, but as I said, there’s a certain sort of excitement that arises from discovering a long dead artist whose work speaks to you so strongly, and though it had no further bearing on my planned project, I began to look into the artist responsible, never having heard of him before.

This took some digging, as information on the man was hard to come by, but while I liked his work a great deal, the more of it I found the more apparent it became that I was discovering not some neglected genius but simply a talented artist, one very much a part of his time. Whether it was Saint Anthony and his demons or the artist himself as Saint Luke, Manuel’s paintings weren’t exactly groundbreaking, even if they are capable takes on popular motifs of his day.  Yet even if the rest of his work failed to captivate me quite as thoroughly as that first, unexpected image did, the life of the artist more than made up for what the art itself lacked.

Manuel was, cheesy though it certainly is to describe him as such, the quintessential Renaissance Man. In addition to being an artistic polymath (and possibly apprenticing under Titian), he tried his hand at just about every career imaginable, and in addition to making money from church commissions, such as the now-destroyed Danse Macabre on the cemetery wall of the Dominican monastery in Bern, he served as a mercenary soldier in the Italian Wars. His time fighting with his Swiss Confederates in Lombardy greatly influenced his work–as with his contemporaries, even as Manuel’s subject matter took its inspiration from the Biblical and the newly rediscovered Classical world, he adorned his subjects in the regalia of his time, particularly the flamboyant mercenary attire of his fellows, and signed his work with a dagger. Yet as he grew older, abandoning the Catholic Church and becoming a religious reformer as well as a political one in Bern, Manuel came to question the mercenary lifestyle that had so informed his art and early life, and as a statesmen he actively campaigned against everything he had once championed.

Niklaus Manuel Deutsch was not a great man living the life of the mind in a golden age of art–he was a social-climbing everyman, a clever, hypocritical artist doing his best to stay afloat in a turbulent time. To me, that’s what makes him such an interesting figure, and why as I further planned the novel that became The Enterprise of Death I kept coming back not just to his atmospheric Death and the Maiden but to the artist behind it. Before I knew it Manuel had entered the novel itself, elbowing his way past those perhaps more worthy than himself to become one of the main characters–he appealed to my interest in conflicted, flawed individuals, and in the end I hope I have done him some small measure of justice with my interpretation of what sort of man he might have been.

It’s the least I owe him, after he gave so much to the novel–in addition to putting in an appearance himself, every single one of his paintings that I’ve referenced here, as well as a couple of others, figures into the plot of the book. It’s funny how something as seemingly small as a mostly forgotten drawing by a Swiss mercenary can in turn inspire another artist working in another medium half a millennium after the fact, but that, I suppose, it the power of art: it transcends its time and place, if luck conspires to preserve it, and continues to cast its artist’s shadow long after the individual throwing it has vanished into history.

Thanks, Manny, and what I said about your not being outstanding or a genius? I take it all back, if only for your Death and the Maiden. Nicely done, old man, very nicely done, indeed.

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Perhaps the best approach, then, is to do as I have done and open with an overly convoluted and essentially imperfect metaphor for the problem—the encryption of meaning in complex symbolism that references the historical, the mythological, or the biblical is, after all, an essential part of the European alchemical tradition. How else to accurately pass along your wisdom without it being exploited by the unworthy?

Alchemy is, by way of a clumsy definition, one of countless methods of pursuing knowledge through applied thought and experimentation. Exactly what sort of knowledge is sought and what sort of experimentation is applied in the seeking varies wildly from place to place, time to time, alchemist to alchemist, and even day to day for those involved in the search, but whatever the alchemist is searching for, the layperson probably wouldn’t understand it anyway (am I right guys? *high fives Agrippa*). Immortality, the transmutation of base matter (often lead or silver) into gold, and enlightenment are the most instantly recognizable goals of the alchemist, and it’s certainly true that these appear quite a bit in the writing and imagery, often wrapped up in one another on both literal and symbolic levels. The Philosopher’s Stone, in addition to doing whatever it did for H.P. (and J.K.’s bank account), could provide all of the above and so much more; small wonder it was so fiercely sought after.

Harder to pin down are the internal transmutations attempted and, according to some, realized by the alchemists—the alchemical marriage of the intellect and the soul. Complicating the discussion further is the question of whether many of the proposed processes and physical ingredients the alchemists speak of, such as those for turning base metals into gold, were the same mundane materials and methods that we recognize today, or if these were in turn coded, allegorical instructions for a spiritual and intellectual transformation. Most likely they were both, depending on the occasion and the alchemist.

The lines between science and magic, between honest discoveries and willful mummery, blur even further as soon as we enter actual alchemists into the equation, and enter them we must, for a discipline is nothing without students. Real figures like John Dee and fictional creations such as Dr. Faustus may capture the imagination and serve as ripe material for literary exploration, but what exactly any given alchemist truly believed is as unknowable as any other historical personage—more likely than not, the magus and the mountebank was the same individual as often as he was decidedly one or the other. Funding for research, as in modern day academia, might require bold claims and impressive results, and if at first one did not succeed than surely there was an intellectual duty to continue the research, even if the patron might become prematurely discouraged were the alchemist’s initial failures discovered.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Enter Paracelsus, quite possibly the quintessential European alchemist and a man of extraordinary reputation—none were so sure of his own genius as himself, but in his lifetime and even long after he convinced as many people of his importance as he did others of his absurdity and charlatanism. His life took him to great heights of fame and glory and terrible lows of infamy and scorn, and his contributions to our modern world range from the taxonomical, for he did so love coining new words and naming new discoveries, to the medicinal, for he was one of the first to reject Galenic medicine in a time when the humors were widely believed to govern human health. Granted, Paracelsus rejected Galen’s theory of humors in favor of one involving abstract notions of interstellar poisons affecting the body, but the good doctor’s hermetical belief that physical health was directly connected to an internal harmony of elements led to his experimenting with various chemical compounds to treat maladies—it’s believed that the wide-traveling Paracelsus is responsible for introducing laudanum to European medicine after seeing its use in the Middle East.

For all we know of the prolific Dr. Paracelsus, or to call him by his full name, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, the man behind the frequently self-contradictory writings and dubious legends remains a mystery as inscrutable as any alchemical riddle. He also plays a role in my novel The Enterprise of Death, which, considering it’s set during his lifetime, takes place in his stomping grounds, and features both witches and syphilis (two of his favorite subjects), was nigh unavoidable. As for the question of how he is portrayed in the book—as the mystical sage of his heroes, the buffoonish conman of his detractors, or something in between—those seeking illumination have all the tools before them to achieve enlightenment.

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This advice seemed at odds with the example they set, Ardanuy and Dunn both leaping from their seats with canes brandished as soon as Tanzer issued her proclamation. Before I could, as Ardanuy had instructed, follow their lead, both men were swarmed by members of the audience packing truncheons of their own. I stood, resolute in that moment to save my mentors, when something bit my hand and I dropped the pistol Dunn had given me. Staring down in horror, I saw a fat weasel dangling from my palm, blood running down the beast’s greedy throat, and when I moved to tear it away with my free hand I felt tiny, sharp claws settle on my shoulder. I froze.

“Not so fast, Tonkatsu,” A woman’s voice breathed in my left ear, my right snuffled by the wet nose of a second polecat. “I’ve got two more where they came from. Now sit down and enjoy the panel. I think an apologist like you will find it…enlightening.”

I did as I was told, and as soon as I sat I heard a squeaking noise, like a dog’s toy, and the weasel hanging from my hand released me and scuttled away under the chair, pushing the dropped pistol in front of it. The ferret maiden had dragged a chair behind mine, and with her second weasel balanced on my shoulder it was all I could do to keep my scotch-inflated bladder in check. She had the drop on me, and as I watched both Ardanuy and Dunn fall under the onslaught I knew I had failed Grossbart Studies.

Soon Dunn and Ardanuy were tied to chairs and dragged to the front of the room, their faces bloodied, their mouths gagged with fake beards. They did not cry, so I cried for them. Of the thirty or forty revisionists it had taken to bring the two professors down only a dozen were able to walk, and these dragged out their fallen comrades so the moans of the injured and the dying would not disrupt the panel. Then we were reminded to turn off our cell phones, and Rahimi addressed the greatly diminished audience as Tanzer peeled off her false beard.

“Now that the absent members of our panel have joined us we may begin,” said Rahimi, leering at Ardanuy and Dunn. “I will open the discussion with an examination of the Brothers Grossbart’s occasional companion, Al-Gassur Abu-Yateem Thanni ibn Farees. It is, of course, impossible to address Al-Gassur without addressing the emperor Timur the Lame, and it is, of course, impossible to address Timur the Lame without addressing Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great—”

Even through his gag Dunn’s shriek of agony made me dry-heave, the sound one of a wife who has lost her husband, a photographer who has lost his sight, a dog who has lost his genitals, a sound, in short, of absolute suffering. Rahimi did not even flinch as he continued his assault. The pain it brought me paled beside the obvious agony Dunn and Ardanuy suffered, the latter periodically passing out in an attempt to end the misery only to have Rahimi’s revisionist theories slap him awake with their blasphemous stench.

Dewsack, returning from the bar, saw the empty seats beside me and came over. For once I was glad for the distraction of his company. As he sat down he nodded at the ferret maiden keeping me pinned in place with her trained hell-weasels.

“Hello, Dumas. Didn’t know you knew Jamie. He was the semester after you, wrote a wonderful little bit of erotic flash about the future of space, or space in the future, or something. Robots banging refrigerators, that sort of thing. Quite vivid.”

I had written nothing of the sort, but was desperate enough to play along.

“Dumas, is it?” I swallowed, the ferret on my shoulder digging its claws in deeper, teeth that could, given enough time, eviscerate a sofa cushion mere inches from my throat. “Well met. What say you take your marmot off me now? You’ve got the gun…”

“Yes, yes, let the poor boy go,” agreed Dewsack, wrinkling his nose at the creature. “We’re all here for a laugh, what?”

“A laugh,” Dumas said in a tone that was anything but affable, but then the weight of the ferret on my shoulder was lifted. “I’m watching you, Tonkatsu. You mess with Rahimi and Tanzer you mess with me and my carpet sharks.”

“Tonkatsu?” Dewsack licked his lips in a manner that only certain fat men can perfect, a silent prayer to the food gods. “That’s a Japanese pork cutlet, isn’t it?”

Without the deadly weasel at my neck I was able to focus on Rahimi’s lecture, and despite my convictions I found my Judas chin nodding at much of what he was saying. Orientalism was unavoidable in a field such as ours, and should be guarded against. Could we talk about the Brothers Grossbart and not talk about the East? I was no longer sure. When Rahimi concluded with a brilliant series of comparisons to Charlie Chan, Jackie Chan, and Cowboy Curtis from The Pee-Wee Herman Show I found myself on my feet and clapping as loudly as the rest of the revisionists.

Then Tanzer took the podium, her chin still pink from the adhesive she had used to keep her beard in place. I was eager to hear her thoughts but those shameful bare cheeks chafed me, and I found myself wondering if I was an inside beard, and if so, whose? Was I an apologist or a revisionist? Why must I choose?

“The Brothers Grossbart,” Tanzer began, “were sadistic, racist, xenophobic, sexist degenerates.”

A round of applause. I twitched. I could hear Dumas clapping behind me, which meant her hands weren’t on the gun. I twitched again.

“That said, they were products of their time and place, and in the chronicles we often find them voicing interesting views on any number of topics,” Tanzer looked from Ardanuy to Dunn, who had both gone still in their bonds, looking up at her with unabashed interest. “This is why my discussion tonight will focus solely on women in the Grossbart texts, and how gender studies—”

Ardanuy vomited, a foul scotch stew bubbling through the colander of fake beard blocking his mouth, and Dunn tipped his chair in a desperate attempt to headbutt Tanzer. As Rahimi and Tanzer tried to restore order, I twisted around in my seat to address Dewsack and Dumas. The ferret maiden held a weasel in each hand like some deranged zookeeper-turned-gunslinger and my former professor burped.

“Listen,” I said, more to Dumas than the ineffectual Dewsack. “Your camp makes a lot of good points. Really. But they’re killing Ardanuy and Dunn! One’s going to choke on his own puke and the other’s going to have embolism if we don’t get them out of here!”

“You want me to call them a wah-mbulance?” Dumas sneered. “You came here to assassinate Rahimi and Tanzer, plain and simple, and we got the upper hand. That’s how academia works, Tonkatsu—if the scholarship is outdated it gets dumped.”

“They never said anything about assassinating anyone,” I protested, leaving aside what they might have clearly implied. “They told me they wanted to debate, that’s all!”

“With canes and guns?” But Dumas hadn’t put her furs on me again, which was a good sign.

“They’re eccentric! And they know what you revisionists think of their theories, so they came prepared. And look at the result—two against fifty, or however many of you there are. Shouldn’t you let them slit their own throats in a scholarly fashion instead of torturing them to death?”

“Not three against fifty?” Dumas narrowed her eyes at me.

“I’m a research assistant,” I said, straightening my shoulders. “It’s what I do. But I won’t be one forever, and neither will you, if that’s all you are to them.”

She flinched. Dewsack burped again, clearly bored with the resumed lecture and hoping we would spice things up. I hurried on.

“Listen to me, please—if we want to be true scholars we need to hear all sides, we need to examine all the material, not just the scholarship we agree with. When the day comes when you’re doing your own research, writing your own books, don’t you want to look back on the Baton Rouge conference and say I was one of the scholars who heard both sides, who encouraged debate instead of stifling it. Isn’t that what you lot are on about, opening up the debate to include everyone? Please, just look at Dunn and Ardanuy.”

And she did, peering past me at the bound professors—Ardanuy was obviously suffocating, and I think Dunn might have been trying to bite off his own tongue to end it all. Dumas looked back at me and gave the slightest of nods. Then she set the two ferrets at her feet, a second pair emerged from the folds of the coat, and all four began war dancing toward the front of the room. Dewsack nudged me, and I saw he had retrieved Dunn and Ardanuy’s fallen canes. Taking one in each hand, I felt the power of the unbiased scholar course through me.

Dumas’ weasels had reached Dunn and Ardanuy, shimmying up the professors and gnawing at their bonds. I knew that at any moment a revisionist would notice the escape attempt and so it came to pass that I found myself leaping from chair to chair, from row to row, a cane flashing in each hand. I might concede the revisionists a point or two but cracking chins armored only with criminally dishonest fake beards was a rare treat as all eyes turned to me, Tanzer’s lecture trailing off as I bore down on her and Rahimi. The shock of finding an enemy in their midst had initially stayed the audience but now they were rising up to thwart my charge, brass knuckles and blackjacks and clubs falling upon me; at the front of the room Tanzer brandished a glaive and Rahimi a pair of long needles. Before the audience could bring me to earth I saw Ardanuy and Dunn stand, unleashed and spitting out fake beards, and I hurled their canes at them. Neither professor was looking at me yet both snatched their walking sticks out of the air and went to work.

In the ensuing debate I lost four teeth, a fingernail, and the sensation in my legs and left buttock. It was glorious. When Dunn beat the revisionist audience members off me I repaid his previous kindness by delivering a solid kick to the old man’s fruitstand, and when he doubled over I bashed him with a folding chair. Then Ardanuy tackled me, only to have Rahimi leap on his back and bite his ear. Tanzer and Dewsack were locked in mortal combat, Dumas and her hell-weasels were snapping at both sides, and even the rousebirds working the door of the bar entered the fray with bike chains swinging. It was a night of blood, and as the bartender, one John “Cash Money” Gove, hurled bottles of scotch into the melee it became a night of liquor in the ears and broken glass in the feet and few regrets.

The next morning I carpooled back to Tallahassee with Dewsack, my car having been set ablaze after the panel moved the debate outside to the parking lot. Dewsack could not see due to being sprayed in the eyes with ferret urine, and I could not use my legs after Dunn had finally caught up with me and resumed the assault he had begun upon first meeting me in Tallahassee. The result was that Dewsack manned the pedals while I worked the steering wheel and instructed the blinded man on when to brake.

Dunn and Ardanuy have sworn vengeance against me, as have Rahimi and Tanzer, but if we are to strive for objective scholarship we can no more give in to threats than we can to bribes. My detractors may dismiss my approach and methods, they may call me a “popular historian” or, as Rahimi recently put it in a rather tactless article in the Medieval History Journal, a “scholar for dollar,” but the facts speak for themselves, and I stand by my research. In this account, as in my novel, I have striven for accuracy, authenticity, and honesty, which is all a Grossbart could hope for, or, for that matter, a Grossbart scholar.

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“Up, little Jeffrey,” Dunn’s cane poked me in the armpit and I rolled out of bed before he asked a second time. My sore legs gave out underneath me and I collapsed on the floor. I would give anything to unsee what I saw growing under the bed, but this is neither the time nor the place to discuss the less savory corners of motel mycology.

“Come on, Wellington,” said Ardanuy, clearly disgusted. “Have some coffee and wash up, we’ll be late if you keep lollygagging.”

“We will not be late,” Dunn smiled. “Will we, Jeffrey?”

The carpet squished as he tapped his cane on the floor and I was on my feet despite the spasms this brought on. Splashing my face with rust-flecked water, I could see in the cracked bathroom mirror that I had been crying in my sleep. Coming back out and sipping the scotch Ardanuy poured me I wondered if they had gotten any rest, but gauging by the undisturbed, moist film coating the other bed I doubted it.

The setting sun cast a bloody haze over Baton Rouge as we coasted into the parking lot of the venue where our quarry had scheduled their panel: New Directions in Grossbart Studies. Rather than being held on one of the city’s campuses we were at a dive bar called the Rousebird Roost. I had been briefed by the professors on the defensive tactics Rahimi and Tanzer were liable to employ, and apparently choosing venues far removed from reputable auditoriums and lecture halls was typical.

“Always trying to throw us from the stink, yes, but we hounds are quick of snout,” Dunn’s chuckle did not wholly cover the sound of his pistol being cocked. “I have what you call inside beard.”

“This is your first time at a conference, isn’t it Jeffrey?” said Ardanuy, not without a trace of pity. “Just follow our lead, and save any accusations for the Q and A no matter what slander they sling. Better to take it on the chin than come off as amateur.”

“I’m done with the both of you. Get the hell out of my car, you crazy coots,” I almost said, but at that exact moment Dunn’s cane shot out of the backseat and poked the rearview mirror so that he could meet my eyes in the reflection. He did not speak, and I looked away. It was time.

Security was tight at the conference, the door flanked by an ibis-like man and a robin-ish woman wearing uniforms embroidered to look like a rousebird’s bright plumage. They patted me down but nodded the professors through—Dunn’s “inside beard,” I wagered. The interior of the bar was as unlike the exterior as I am unlike a hedgehog. Very different, is what I’m getting at.

Rows of folding chairs had been set up just inside the door, and Ardanuy and Dunn claimed the empty seats closest to the door and ordered me to fetch drinks. I walked along the rear row of chairs, taking in the polished floor, the mahogany podium at the front of the almost-filled seating area, the quiet hum of academic jargon from the well-dressed assembly. Everyone in the audience wore beards. Reaching the bar I ordered three neat singlemalts when a liverwurst breeze tickled my ear and chorizo fingers swatted my shoulder.

“Jimmy! Jimmy Billings!” My former creative writing professor had sidled up to the bar beside me, a sandwich in one hand and a drink in the other, a fake beard dangling around his chin like a third-rate mall Santa. “Didn’t know you went in for this Grossbart business!”

“Professor Dewsack?” It could be no other, the man’s jowls vibrating as he drained his highball of sambuca and absinthe. “Are you here for the panel?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” he smacked his lips, the licorice-fart smell of his drink making my eyes water. He popped the rest of the sandwich into his mouth, pink crumbs of dried-out meat-spread caught and glistening in his false beard. “They’re mad, the lot of them. I tried to get Ralph and David up here, but you know those guys…”

Dewsack was constantly alluding to his close friendship with Ralph Berry and David Kirby, but despite being on the same faculty the only professor I had ever seen Dewsack talking to had been Mark Winegardner, and that was only after one of Winegardner’s readings when Dewsack had ambushed the poor bastard. Then I realized Dewsack had mentioned Ardanuy’s name and I came back to the present.

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“I said just make sure you aren’t sitting close to Ardanuy. He’s the worst of them, except for that mad swamp-German he sometimes brings. That one’s worse. It’s all good fun provided you aren’t too close when they get into it with the speakers.”

“Dunn,” I said to myself, and Dewsack wagged his waddles.

“Dunn, that was his name. He and Ardanuy—”

“Hello, Cedrick,” Ardanuy had appeared on the other side of me, and Dewsack’s face faded from excited liverwurst red to the greenish-yellow of old headcheese. “I see you’ve met Jeffrey.”

“Jeffrey?” Dewsack blinked at me, and seeing what passed for an out, snatched it. “I’m sorry my boy, I thought you were a Jim I had last semester. My mistake.”

Dewsack’s chubby shadow followed him back to his seat, and Ardanuy paid for the three scotches that the bartender had placed before me. He drained them, one after another, his eyes never leaving mine, and ordered six more. When they arrived he somehow balanced three in each palm, his cane tucked in his armpit, and without a word returned to his seat. I followed, abashed, and saw the only available chair was between Dunn and Ardanuy.

“Mecky little Jeffrey, sleeping with the enemy,” Dunn tut-tuted as I sat down, the lights dropping.

“I—” was not allowed to finish as the barrel of Dunn’s pistol pressed into my side.

“Is alright, Jeffrey, is A-okay,” Dunn inexplicably winked at me. “Inside beard is better than no beard at all.”

“Look at them, Wellington,” Ardanuy murmured from my other side, passing a brimming glass of scotch to me. It had not been half as full when he had received it from the bartender. “Look at their beards, and then tell me if you think we’re mad.”

Taking the drink, my shaking hands splashed Islay on my sweat-soaked shirt as I brought it to my lips, wondering if I could drain the glass before Dunn murdered me. I looked around as I was told, surreptitiously scanning the room for a restroom to escape through. As the scotch warmed my throat, however, I focused on the beards of the audience, and the sight sent chills up and down my swollen legs—they were all fake, every one of them. Dewsack was eccentric enough that it had barely registered but now, seeing the sea of synthetic fibers passing for beards, the fire the scotch had lit in my belly began to spread, indignation blazing into anger, anger flaring up into rage.

“Fakes,” I tugged on my own beard—it was still far shorter than I would have liked but at least I was making the effort. “They’re all goddamn fakes!”

“Ah, now Jeffrey is seeing the problem,” said Dunn, removing the gun from my side as I finished the scotch. “New historicism is polluting field like rat turds in a beer barrel.”

“Not anymore,” said Ardanuy firmly. “Not after tonight. Tonight we end this.”

“Jeffrey,” said Dunn, and feeling cold pearl in my sweaty palm I looked down to see he had pressed the gun into it. “If one is to be as Grossbart, one must do as Grossbart. Yes?”

Before I could answer applause ripped through the bar, and looking up I saw two figures now stood on either side of the podium. One was a short, skinny fellow with the longest beard yet seen, the other a woman with bobbed hair and neatly trimmed Lenin beard. Rahimi and Tanzer—the revisionists.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Rahimi intoned, his pleasant, cultured voice immediately setting my teeth on edge. “We come with a message.”

The audience leaned in as Rahimi stepped back, allowing Tanzer to take the podium.

“Death to the Grossbarts,” the woman said triumphantly, and as the collective gasp of the assembled sucked in she went on before the human tide could push back out a wave of shouts and cries. “Long live the new beards!”

Dunn and Ardanuy, for their parts, both went completely apeshit, and the conference got underway in earnest.

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Then came Professor Ardanuy’s history class, and who should I see on the syllabus but my old friend Trevor Caleb Walker and a pdf of his epic poem. Approaching the professor after class, I mentioned having owned a copy growing up, and before I could even tell him that I was looking forward to the class I was whisked off to the bearded man’s office, a strange shine in his eye. He grilled me for the better part of an hour, and when I confessed to not knowing what had become of my copy of the text he turned the color of an old campfire’s coals and drank straight scotch from a coffee mug. I was told in no uncertain terms that were I able to produce the book my success in the class was assured. When I tactfully told him I would not be able to scour my old room until the holiday break he poured himself a second mug, and said in a conspiratorial tone,

“Dunn’s coming for Christmas, my boy. We mustn’t disappoint Dunn.”

I was, in a word, unnerved. I went to see my academic adviser about dropping the class but she had already left for the day, and so I went home and called my mother. She confirmed my suspicions that the tattered tome had been lost or thrown away a decade previous. Having gained some idea of the volume’s worth from Ardanuy’s unabashed hunger for the thing, I went to bed bummed to have lost a treasure but not terribly concerned for my academic future.

The next morning I went to my adviser’s office straightaway, only to be informed that due to some issue with capping of class sizes and prerequisites for a History major and something called the Don Johnson Initiative I would be unable to drop Ardanuy’s class without jeopardizing my scholarship. That my adviser had a large, unopened bottle of scotch with a skeletal elk head on the label did not escape my notice, nor did the fact that this was the same whisky Ardanuy had been pounding the day before. An undergraduate had precious little recourse in those dark days, unfortunately, and so I was trapped.

Over the course of the semester my classmates dwindled, dropping one after another like desiccated leaves from a dying oak, until midway through the term I was the only student still attending class. When I asked Ardanuy about this he became irate, his knuckles going ivory around the ornately carved cane he carried everywhere despite being spry as an athlete half his age. Every class he asked about the book, and every class I stalled him, sticking to my story that I would not be able to search my childhood possessions until after the semester.

I learned a great deal from Ardanuy, indeed, few scholars could match his passion, and I soon discovered that everything I thought I knew about the Grossbarts was wrong. They were villeins who questioned the status quo of serfdom, not villains out to make a mark. The professor would, during the classes when he had more than a cup of his Scottish coffee, reenact some of the Brother Grossbarts’ more impressive battles, and to this day my arms are striped from his cane. I fell under the old man’s spell, and one fateful day when I took the professor up on his standing offer of a cup of coffee I confessed to having lost the book.

Ardanuy did not rage, as I might have expected. On the contrary, all the color and emotion seemed to leave him, and he became as some blank golem. “Oh dear,” was all he would say, “oh dear.” And then, as I was leaving, “Dunn won’t be happy.”

Of course by this time I had become intimately acquainted with Dunn’s scholarship, the man’s Holy Beard, Holy Grail being the core text of Ardanuy’s class. That Dunn had written the introduction for Ardanuy’s own book on the Grossbarts was a fact that was reiterated every time the subject came up, which was daily even as the semester came to its conclusion and my meetings with Ardanuy were nominally stripped of their academic worth—I did not return home, but stayed on as his assistant over the winter break. My nervousness at Dunn’s imminent arrival to give a lecture was only compounded by Ardanuy’s grave demeanor in the days leading up to the event, and the news that I would personally be retrieving the great man from the airport. Ardanuy refrained from accompanying me.

All my trepidation evaporated upon meeting Heer Dunn, the kindly fellow appearing every bit as soft as Ardanuy was rough, his sideburns trim, his goatee long and downy. As I carried his bags down to the car he mentioned the Walker volume that Ardanuy had told him I owned, and I told him the truth of the matter.

“Ah, is the way with mothers, yes, throwing away the preciousness of youth,” Dunn bobbed his head knowingly, his cane tap-tap-tapping across the parking lot. The gilded walking stick bore more than a passing resemblance to Ardanuy’s, and this similarity was made all the more obvious when he suddenly jabbed me in the back of the knee with it. I fell, and before Dunn’s bags had crashed to earth beside me the great man was battering me with his cane and bellowing in Dutch.

I might have perished from the assault if a bearded shadow had not appeared from between the cars brandishing a cane of his own, and the battle was joined. By the time I had wiped away the tears enough to see that Professor Ardanuy had rescued me the two men were embracing, canes hanging limp, a strange, identical laugh coming from their throats. Then they turned to where I lay, their eyes glittering in the light of a streetlamp, and Ardanuy said,

“Heer Dunn, may I introduce my research assistant, Jeffrey Wellington.”

That even after four months of daily interactions Ardanuy could not get my name right bothered me far less than the welts rising on my legs and the cruel hardness to their faces.

“Mecky little Jeffrey is making his introductions poorly,” said Dunn. “Tut tut.”

“He’ll make it up to you,” said Ardanuy, and there might have been fear on my professor’s face. “He’ll make it up to both of us.”

“Yes,” said Dunn, straightening up. “Yes. I am double-checking Rahimi and Tanzer’s attendance at Baton Rouge, and both are committed.”

“We’ll be there by dawn,” Ardanuy nodded vigorously.

“Baton Rouge?” I struggled to my feet, legs as wobbly as my mind from excruciating pain and the mention of the hated revisionists Tanzer and Rahimi, a pair of academics who had irrevocably besmirched true Grossbart historicism. “I thought your lecture was here, tomorrow, and—”

Dunn raised his cane and I went quiet. “Lecture is canceled, little Jeffrey. We are going to debate with fellow scholars.”

I pretended not to notice the pearl-handled pistol Ardanuy slipped Dunn as we got into my car and drove away from Tallahassee, toward Baton Rouge and a reckoning with the revisionists.

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